Recently my husband and I and friends took our dogs walking out to Point San Simeon, just below Hearst Castle off Highway One. We’ve lived on the central coast of California nearly all our adult lives, and visited this area often, yet it’s the first time we’ve walked to the point. It won’t be our last. It was one of those breathtakingly beautiful days, and the scenery was stunning. Well worth sharing a few photos with friends.

We took Highway 46 over to the coast, the hillsides sprinkled with wild flowers.

Along the way we catch glimpses of the ocean . . .

. . . including Morro Rock.

Here’s a view of San Simeon Bay, with the pier and a peek of Hearst Castle on the hillside.

A closer view of the Castle.

We start our walk on the beach looking out at the point.

Here’s where the trail begins. Looking back at the beach and pier.

Friends on the trail.

Back-lit pines.

Wild flowers and fallen oaks.

Some of the largest and most spectacular Eucalyptus trees we’ve ever seen. . .

beautifully sculpted . . .

and inspiring . . .

wayward philosophers . . .

. . . explorers . . .

. . . and poets.

Finally we reach the point, complete with a lone fisherman and an elephant seal sleeping in the half-shade.

In case you missed him in the last photo.

Dazzling shades of blue around the sea-washed rocks on the point.

One last backward glimpse of the pier and beach as we head back to the car.

Here on the central coast of California, we look forward to a green, rather than white, Christmas. While we love our golden hills of summer, we crave green in the winter. During last year’s drought our summer hills turned dun. Even the golden grasses dried up and blew away, and this lasted through winter. But this year our green came early and I’ve been revelling in it.

I’ve been ill–nothing serious–but lying in bed day after day, even surrounded by good books, tends toward melancholy. Reading Mary Oliver’s poetry this morning is the perfect cure. This one especially speaks to me.

Poppiesby Mary Oliver

The poppies send up their
orange flares; swaying
in the wind, their congregations
are a levitation

of bright dust, of thin
and lacy leaves.
There isn’t a place
in this world that doesn’t

sooner or later drown
in the indigos of darkness,
but now, for a while,
the roughage

shines like a miracle
as it floats above everything
with its yellow hair.
Of course nothing stops the cold,

black, curved blade
from hooking forward—
of course
loss is the great lesson.

But I also say this: that light
is an invitation
to happiness,
and that happiness,

when it’s done right,
is a kind of holiness,
palpable and redemptive.
Inside the bright fields,

touched by their rough and spongy gold,
I am washed and washed
in the river
of earthly delight—

and what are you going to do—
what can you do
about it—
deep, blue night?

A notebook full of poetry I had worked on for years has disappeared. Vanished. Many of the poems I never copied into a word document. They may be lost forever. But several I know by heart, I’ve recited them so often. They are heavy with rhyme and rhythm, and I know that is why I remember them. The bards of long ago who sang their stories knew that we remember best verses that rhyme. Somehow our brains are made to carry these tunes in our swaying bodies. We feel them in our bones.

Here’s one I remember well, that I wrote when we were sailing, anchored in Bora Bora, of all places. It’s a “light” poem, pun intended. In fact, it was first entitled “Light Thoughts.” I’ve renamed it below, but reserve the right to switch it back. You never know.

I like it for its lightness. And I hesitate to share it for the same reason. It’s lightness, and its use of rhyme and rhythm, which serious poets seldom use today. For obvious reasons. Use of rhyme and rhythm seems too heavy-handed, too showy and childish, decidedly old-fashioned.

Serious poetry loses something when it rhymes. Alexander Pope and Shakespeare, and some of the other old masters could pull it off—-it was all the rage then. But now it sounds too much like greeting cards or the jingles you hear on TV to sell soap and cat litter. Or the picture books we read to children. The nursery rhymes we all grew up with, if we were lucky.

This poem could be found in a book of poetry for children. But it was written for adults. For me, to be more precise. And for others like me who see the world in a particular slant of light, and like to play with it.

Playing With Light

I like the slant of afternoon,
The shadows cut so clear,
Light lays down as if it’s found
A home on earth more pure.

I like the way each melting ray
Slides across the land,
To flow beneath the lowest leaf
And lift it in its hand.

The smallest stone is sudden grown,
A blade of grass stands tall.
The hills unwind one at a time
To dance before us all.

I like the way light likes to play
And catch me from behind,
Igniting hair with light so rare
It catapults the mind.

Yet when the light is laid so low
It tumbles from the earth,
And afternoon succumbs too soon
Mere embers on the hearth,

I find in night a keener light
To prick the bounds of thought.
Upon the spires of whirling stars
My reeling mind is caught.

Recently we had visitors who had just returned from Italy. We talked of how easily you can stumble upon ancient Roman ruins lying beside the road or tumbled along the edge of a parking lot. Paving stones from some ancient road where the legendary 13th Legion once marched; the foundations of a fallen aqueduct; broken urns and shards of pottery. None of it cordoned off to protect. None of it of much value.

It’s a common sight for the native populations, but an unexpected pleasure and exciting discovery for visiting tourists. In some ways these ruins impact us more deeply than the ruins we find with tourist guides or behind museum walls.

As we were talking, I pointed to the “Roman Oaks” in the meadow outside our window.

I’ve come to see these fallen giants, the ruins of ancient oaks that lie scattered in the hills outside our home, with the same sense of tender regard and respect. Once they had been huge and thriving ecosystems, little cities providing shelter and food for a vast variety of creatures large and small. Some dominated the landscape for centuries. Children were born and grew old and died in full view of their robust splendor. The trees that now surround these ruins were tiny saplings or green shoots or still bound within round acorns when these giants spread their roots across the hillsides and threw vast shadows across the land.

I’ve come to love these ruins. There’s beauty in the sleek stripped limbs, sculptured by the wind and rain and passing predators. Beauty in their moss and lichen painted bark. Beauty in the way their sharp ruins rise like flames against the sky. Beauty in their hollowed trunks and upturned roots. I walk among them with their fine mulch crumbled underfoot and feel a sense of timelessness. The past and present tangled together.

All the new thinking is about loss.
In this it resembles all the old thinking.
The idea, for example, that each particular erases
the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown-
faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk
of that black birch is, by his presence,
some tragic falling off from a first world
of undivided light. Or the other notion that,
because there is in this world no one thing
to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds,
a word is elegy to what it signifies.
We talked about it late last night and in the voice
of my friend, there was a thin wire of grief, a tone
almost querulous. After a while I understood that,
talking this way, everything dissolves: justice,
pine, hair, woman, you and I. There was a woman
I made love to and I remembered how, holding
her small shoulders in my hands sometimes,
I felt a violent wonder at her presence
like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river
with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat,
muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish
called pumpkinseed. It hardly had to do with her.
Longing, we say, because desire is full
of endless distances. I must have been the same to her.
But I remember so much, the way her hands dismantled bread,
the thing her father said that hurt her, what
she dreamed. There are moments when the body is as numinous
as words, days that are the good flesh continuing.
Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings,
saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.

“When we open ourselves and take in the sorrows of the world, letting them penetrate our insulated hut of the heart, we are both overwhelmed by the grief of the world and in some strange alchemical way, reunited with the aching, shimmering body of the planet. We become acutely aware that there is no “out there;” we share one continuous presence, one shared skin. Our suffering is mutually entangled, the one with the other, as is our healing.”

In the second part of his essay he lists four ways we can reconnect with this “continuous presence.”

An Apprenticeship with Slowness

Uncentering the Human

Drinking the Tears of the World

Entering the Storehouse of Myth

Each is beautifully articulated, and I urge you to read his whole essay. But the third resonated most with me that day, and I’ve extracted it here.

Drinking the Tears of the World. How can we fail to love this achingly beautiful world when we are so completely jumbled together with it all? It is our myopia, our species-centric blindness that cuts us off from the actual world. To love this world, however, is to also know sorrow. Our grief is intimately connected to how far we allow our love to reach into the world. Think of those indigenous tribes willing to fight to the death to protect their homelands from being destroyed by mining or oil companies. They know their lives are inseparable from the animals, plants, rivers, spirits and ancestors of their lands. Our love was also meant to spill out into the world, into the forests, the rivers and cloudbanks. It was not meant to congeal in a single person or even a single species. As Thomas Berry said, “We have become a singular species talking only to itself.” When this happens—when the arc between our bodies and the great body of the earth breaks—we fall into an attachment disorder of epic proportions and everything suffers. Grief work is the third way we restore the bond with the world we inhabit.

The good news is we are supremely crafted to feel kinship with this breathing world. We are giant receptor sites for taking in the blue of the sky, the taste of honey, the caress of a lover, the scent of rain. Paul Shepard said we are more like a pond surface than a closed system: We are permeable, exchanging the vibrancy of wind, pollen, color and fragrance. Life moves into us and through us like a breeze, affecting us and shaping us into a part of the terrain. We are inseparable from all that surrounds us. To mend the attachment disorder, we simply have to step out of our isolated room of self and into the wider embrace that awaits each of us. When we do, something magical happens. As we build our capacity for transparency and allow the world to enter us, our feelings of love blossom and an erotic leap occurs, bringing everything close to our heart.

One of the reasons this essay resonated with me is because this idea of a “larger Self” is a theme that has been developing in my writing and my personal narrative, something I’ve been playing with for ages.

I think I return to it again and again because it reminds me to move beyond a personal, limited sense of self and experience myself in a larger, more expansive way. A way that rings more true to me.

It is certainly not a new idea, this sense of connecting with nature, with others, of an overriding, embracing Oneness. But I’m experiencing it in a new, more personal, more immediate way. It’s become a lens through which I see my personal and public history writ large.

Like this:

Since posting the speech by George Saunders I’ve been searching, without success for the poem he mentions by Hayden Carruth, who late in life claims he’s “mostly Love, now.” [Poem found since posting this! A kind reader copied it into the comments below]

But in that search I discovered some of the poetry which makes that proclamation so believable.

I’ll share one with you. See if you agree with me.

The Cows At Night

by Hayden Carruth –

The moon was like a full cup tonight,
too heavy, and sank in the mist
soon after dark, leaving for light

faint stars and the silver leaves
of milkweed beside the road,
gleaming before my car.

Yet I like driving at night
in summer and in Vermont:
the brown road through the mist

of mountain-dark, among farms
so quiet, and the roadside willows
opening out where I saw

the cows. Always a shock
to remember them there, those
great breathings close in the dark.

I stopped, and took my flashlight
to the pasture fence. They turned
to me where they lay, sad

and beautiful faces in the dark,
and I counted them–forty
near and far in the pasture,

turning to me, sad and beautiful
like girls very long ago
who were innocent, and sad

because they were innocent,
and beautiful because they were
sad. I switched off my light.

But I did not want to go,
not yet, nor knew what to do
if I should stay, for how

in that great darkness could I explain
anything, anything at all.
I stood by the fence. And then

very gently it began to rain.

NOTE: A reader found the poem I was looking for and kindly copied it into his comment below–thank you so much J.D Garver!

I wrote this poem as a grad student while living in that highly interior world of academia. I’d been feeling out of balance and needing to reconnect to the world around me. Then I saw a leaf tremble in a light breeze “and saw more life in it than in me.”

I wanted that. That ability to be spontaneously receptive and responsive to the world around me. To tremble deliciously in the breeze’s embrace.

Tremble of a Leaf

The tremble of a leaf awoke me.

So far inside I had gone, Where id and ego threw Long shadows across my mirrored face To mystify me.

Where I dug odd relics From a befuddled past, Gazing long to find some answer That escaped me.

Where men were but some dark puzzle, pieces I never bothered to make whole— Only analyze.

Where Nature herself Roused no awe in me, Needing only to be computed To comprehend.

So far inside I had gone That when the wind passed over me I moved not—

Only to see a leaf tremble, And see more life in it Than in me.

We are constantly navigating between the interior and exterior world, but sometimes one gets privileged over the other and we feel off-balanced. This happens in the world of academia with its classrooms and labs and libraries and constant reading and writing and talking. It also happens to us as writers, bloggers, gamers—this plugged in generation, with all the texting and tweeting, the TV viewing, internet surfing.

So often I see people, young and old, walking down the street wearing ear buds, listening to music instead of the wind blowing through the birches, talking to someone on a cell phone, rather than connecting with the children playing on the lawns they pass.

Sometimes we try to get out of our heads and into our bodies through sports or working out, yoga and dance, digging in the garden, taking hikes. Travel helps too, because it takes us into the unfamiliar and makes the exterior exotic, interesting in a way it has ceased to be at home.

But even then, if our heads are filled with constant chattering—thinking, worrying, weighing, measuring, planning, remembering, anticipating—we’re still in our heads, the interior dialogue is drowning out the exterior, acting as a filter to keep us from being as spontaneously responsive to the world around us as we could be.

That’s why I like to practice “no-mind,” having no thought, as I move through my day. Turning out the interior chatter allows me to experience the exterior world with no filters, nothing coming between me and it. Pure experience. It’s like when we try relaxing, concentrating on releasing the tension in each part of our body until we finally go limp. Emptying the mind is like that. The body is still there, the mind is still there, we are still there, but we experience a sense of clarity and peace that seems egoless, bodiless. A surrendering to “what-is,” not unlike surrendering to the water when floating on our backs, letting ourselves melt into its flexible support. Body, water, one thing.

Ironically, the letting go of the interior chatter, letting go of the filters that divide us into I and Other, this and that, here and there, this pure unfiltered experience of the exterior, enables us to realize that “in reality” there is no interior and exterior. It’ all one thing, one be-ing, not an “it” but a continuum and a spaciousness, a wall-less sense of self that includes everything around us. Interior and exterior merge into a single co-existence. Like moonlight on water. Interior and exterior reflecting each other.

This sense of oneness never lasts very long, alas. Like floating on your back or going limp, an orgasm or the scent of orange blossoms. It’s all fleeting. But it’s nice to know we’re not fleeting. We’re the flow. And all these fleeting things flow with us. Not two.

The tremble of a leaf woke me to the need to be responsive to the world around me, to experience it unfiltered by thought. But it’s nice to know that no matter how far inside we go, how interior we become, the exterior is only a touch, a glance, away. A mere turn of the head, a pause between thoughts that widens, a stillness that cuts through the clutter of our minds, and we feel that breeze, and tremble in its embrace.

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This blog explores what it means to be living on the edge of the wild, both literally and figuratively, through reflecting on nature, human consciousness,the creative arts, and our years traveling around the world on a sailboat.

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Purpose of Blog

After sailing around the world in a small boat for six years, I came to appreciate how tiny and insignificant we humans appear in our natural and untamed surroundings, living always on the edge of the wild, into which we are embedded even while being that thing which sets us apart. Now living again on the edge of the wild in a home that borders a nature preserve, I am re-exploring what it means to be human in a more than human world.